Bioinformatics

The icon on the main page is a thumbnail of Salvador Dali's Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid, 1963, which is his tribute to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, elucidated 10 years earlier by Watson and Crick.

The center is one of the five main sequencing centers (G5) involved in the Human Genome Project. In April of 2003 we have completed the Human Genome Project. Our Genome Center has been responsible for finishing Chromosomes 3 and 12. We have also contributed to the sequencing of Chromosome X. In total, we are responsible for finishing 10% of the human genome.

It has been quite exciting to partake in the last stretch of the Human Genome Project. I have written a variety of analysis and reporting tools to validate our tiling path and help our annotators work out trouble regions. I have also written a meta-assembler for aligning and stitching our chromosomes. The project eventually evolved to stitch the entire human genome based on the publicly available tiling paths published at NCBI.

Since the completion of the project, the genome center is pursuing other research opportunities. We are in the midst of sequencing about a dozen other genomes, some of which are biologically important (e.g. rat, mouse, sea-urchin, honeybee) and some of which are useful for other purposes (e.g. the cow for agricultural studies).

I'm currently involved in the HapMap Project, which piggybacks on the completed sequence of the human genome to elucidate genetic variations among individuals (the 0.1% of the genome which varies among the 6 billion people living on this planet).